William S. Oates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Florida State University. His research interests include solid mechanics of functional materials such as ferroelectric materials, electroactive elastomers, and liquid crystal polymer networks. His research also focuses on the integration of these materials into adaptive structures and systems. He obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2004 from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He spent two years at North Carolina State University at the Center for Research in Scientific Computation conducting research in nonlinear control before arriving at Florida State University in 2006.